Consolidating Studio Ghibli with 42.3% of the voting rights (2023)

The author’s view

In 1985, when the stations bid for the television rights to Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and every one of them offered a seven o’clock children’s slot, only Nippon Television offered nine o’clock. Ghibli’s executive officer Nishioka Junichi has said that was the decisive reason for choosing it. Thirty-eight years later that relationship took the form of 42.3% of the voting rights. It is telling that, alongside the outside expert’s valuation, the company cited “a transaction based on a long-standing relationship of trust with Ghibli” in explaining the price; some read an enterprise value of about ¥37 billion as cheap relative to what the studio is actually worth. Part of the price, one may say, was set not by the market but by accumulated time.

The work left to the buyer, though, is heavy. At the press conference Suzuki Toshio said that he and Miyazaki Hayao had neglected the training of successors, and that raising the next generation would require a television series. Yet Ghibli’s production method rests on a single director holding an entire work together, which sits awkwardly with the recent television series in which the director of each episode is effectively its director. Takahata Isao died in 2018, and Miyazaki Hayao is advancing in years. Bringing the rights and the works onto the balance sheet is one job; making the company able to keep producing works is another, and the answer to the second is not yet in.